1 Introduction

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

Many modern web frameworks in the Java space are more complicated than needed and don’t embrace the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principles.

Dynamic frameworks like Rails and Django helped pave the way to a more modern way of thinking about web applications. Grails builds on these concepts and dramatically reduces the complexity of building web applications on the Java platform. What makes it different, however, is that it does so by building on already established Java technologies like Spring and Hibernate.

Grails is a full stack framework and attempts to solve as many pieces of the web development puzzle through the core technology and its associated plugins. Included out the box are things like:

1.1.3 New Testing Framework

Grails 3.3 includes a new Trait-based testing framework that replaces the existing @TestMixin based framework with a simpler implementation that is easier to debug, provides better code completion and is easier to extend.

1.1.5 Updated Dependencies

Hibernate 5.1.5 (now the default version of Hibernate for new applications)

Spring Framework 4.3.9

Spring Boot 1.5.4

Gradle 3.5 (Grails 3.3 is also compatible with Gradle 4.x)

Spock 1.1

1.1.6 Other Novelties

Cache Plugin Rewritten

The Cache Plugin has been rewritten and no loader use proxies which improves startup time and performance. The plugin is also now Multi-Tenant aware, ensuring that cached data is not seen by other tenants.

Plug-ins

Services

Servlet API

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